What’s better than text in iMessage? GIFs! And what’s better than GIFs? DIY-higher-quality GIFs of course! Gfycat, already one of the leading DIY GIF platforms on the web, is making its entry on mobile, via the iMessage app platform.

Gfycat is not just another GIF platform. Having just raised $10 million for its user-generated platform, Gfycat is now available on iPhone. The new app has been specifically designed for integration with iMessage, and lets you search, send, but also create your own high quality GIFs, called “Gfycat loops.”

And what is even more amazing, is that Gfycat comes with an existing library of 25 million unique GIFs. That surely makes it the largest GIF resource on the iPhone! And in case you can’t find what you are looking for, the app comes with a whole set of in-app creation tools so you can create your own!

Technically speaking, Gfycat loops are not GIFs. And that’s what’s even more awesome about them. According to the company, Gfycat’s content is compressed 20 times more efficiently than a GIF file, which means they can display, in 16 million colours instead of the 256 colours that GIFs are limited to. That’s the main reason why Gfycat chose iMessage to bring its service to mobile users.

Gfycat loops are also perfectly smooth. The company uses a technique called “palindrome looping” that allows seamless looping, as explained by Gfycat co-founder and CEO Richard Rabbat:

As we approached mobile, we focused on enabling more creation in the iMessage app, but made the creation appropriate to the medium. When you take a clip, we apply a technique called palindrome looping – also referred to as ping-pong – to make the GIF loop seamless.

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Geoff is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of We are Social Media. He also leads the Social Media team at Zimmerman, an Omnicom agency based out of South Florida, USA. Geoff is also a visiting lecturer at Universities across Europe and the US, and an international #smm speaker.